All right, and it says we're now recording. It says Slate Slow Burn 8 seconds. Here we go.

Steven Engelberg is the Editor-in-Chief of ProPublica. Back in 2001, he was the Investigation's

Editor for The New York Times. One of his reporters was a Times veteran named Judith Miller.

Maybe a couple of weeks after July 4th, 2001, Judy came to my desk and she said, got an

amazing story. We've got to go, we've got to go fast. This is really astounding stuff.

And I said, okay, okay, so what do you got? What she had did sound amazing. An intercept

of a conversation between two members of Al Qaeda.

And the first guy says something along the lines of, it's really a shame the United States

did not retaliate for the attack on the USS Cole, which was an American ship that had been

attacked by a sort of suicide bombing dinghy. And then the second guy says, well, don't

worry, we're playing something so big they're going to have to tell you.

Miller had been covering Islamic extremism for years. It seemed like she might have a huge

scoop. Plans by known terrorists to launch a major attack against the United States. Engelberg

was interested. But first he needed to know where the story came from.

So what do we know? I mean, who are these two guys? My source doesn't seem to know. We

are, they're what country are they? Are they high level, low level? Are they just two

guys talking, you know, in a bar, of course, they're Al Qaeda. They're not in a bar.

But I was sort of speaking metaphorically.

Miller didn't have those answers, but said she'd try to find out more.

She came back and said, I just can't get any more detail on this. This is what we've

got. Can we write a story? And I said, Judy, I just don't see how. I said, I see paragraphs

one and maybe two, but what's paragraph three, four, and five? We can't do it.

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